Strolling around the beautiful city of Antwerp we stumbled across a floating piece of greenery, anchored under the shadow of the MAS Museum. Welvaert is an urban vegetable garden[1] constructed by art collective Time Circus[2] on an abandoned ship crane, and features a treehouse made of recycled materials, a kitchen and a small family of chickens.

[3]

Antwerp’s MAS Museum[4] lent the people at Time Circus an old unused crane on which the collective built their cool green space. Anchored at Bonapartedok[5], the experimental space is designed to engage locals and visitors with sustainable urban farming practices.

Time Circus’ fantastic Tree Hotel[6], which featured some crazy recycled tree houses as rooms served as inspiration for their treehouse on Welavert. The cocoon[7] for this garden, which looks like a birds’ nest and is cladded with waterproof tarpaulin—the same material as used in the construction of Frietag bags. Another cute feature from the floating garden is a glazed greenhouse.

The greenhouse is equipped with basic cooking elements for making delicious vegetarian meals[8] using the garden’s produce. They even have some chickens living at the garden in their own little wooden palace. Local organic[9] apples (this time not from the garden) were used for making juice at a recent floating event.

We caught up with one of Time Circus’ designers, Sebastiaan Boumans, who was building a second floating project next to the garden. The new adventure consists of a traveling floating bar, atelier for artists and kitchen, all in a single boat. He is building it from wood left over[10] from some train tracks and the plan, he said, is to take the floating project to Lisbon and the Czech Republic[11].